Calvin Grant Shofner was born on April 7, 1932, in
Gans, Oklahoma, as the youngest of three sons of James "Otto" and Ethel (Quinn) Shofner. During the
Great Depression, the Smiths headed west and settled in
Oakland,
California, Smith began his music career performing at the Remember Me Cafe in
San Francisco at the age of 15, but he was not financially successful at first. Throughout the 1950s, he was not able to continue his music career, so he worked at various other jobs, including
truck driving and
bronco busting. He appeared on the
California Hayride television show in the mid-1950s before serving two years in the
military. After his discharge, he began playing in a band in the
San Francisco Bay Area. In 1961,
country music legend
Ernest Tubb heard the band play, and after an audition, hired Smith to play guitar for his Texas Troubadours; Smith is heard playing in most of Tubb's 1960s recordings. His first solo single was "Tear Stained Pillow" / "Eleven Long Years" on the local Plaid label. Smith's stage name began to catch on after he released his second solo single, "I'll Just Go Home", in 1966 for
Kapp Records, and he first cracked the
Billboard chart with his second single, "The Only Thing I Want". The album's title track had reached the top 40 on the country chart the previous year, and was later a top-10 hit for
George Strait in 1990. In 1970, Smith signed with
Decca Records, and his popularity quickly soared, starting off with his 1972 top-10 hit, "
I've Found Someone of My Own". He began recording songs written by some of the biggest names in the industry; for instance, in March 1973, his rendition of
Bill Anderson's "
The Lord Knows I'm Drinking" became his first number-one country hit. When Decca became
MCA Records in 1973, he enjoyed his biggest successes. In 1974, he recorded two of his greatest hits, "
It's Time to Pay the Fiddler" and "
Country Bumpkin", which received Song of the Year Awards from both the
Academy of Country Music and the
Country Music Association. ==Later career==